White Male Professors to be Trained on ‘Bias’ by Non-White Females in Govt-Backed Scheme

Rob Stothard/Getty10 Aug 2018

Older, white, male professors are to be targeted for politically correct training at a leading British university and given “reverse mentors” to lecture them on so-called “unconscious bias”.

The government-backed initiative will divide people into racial and gender groups according to their perceived victimhood, with the older white professors allocated young female and ethnic minority trainers.

The move is part of a £5.5 million nationwide “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” drive being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which gets more than £850 million a year in taxpayer cash.

The man overseeing the project at Birmingham University, Professor John Rowe, boasted that he wants to treat eminent professors harshly, forcing them to confront their perceived “biases” and leaving them “feeling quite uncomfortable”.

“What is understood about unconscious bias is that we have all got it, but the more you learn about it and become conscious of it, the more you can act,” he told the Telegraph.

“While it is well known and obvious that women and minority groups suffer setbacks to their career progression no one really understands why.

“It’s not as if there is any overt prejudice – it is something to do with the way the system is or the way it has evolved and we needed to find out why.”

He said the aim is to target the “underlying causes” of female and ethnic minority people being less common at the top of academia, implying the reason is “bias” rather than demographics or personal choice.

“We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful, so we are investigating new ways of understanding how to support the progression of our female and ethnic minority colleagues,” he said.

“Questions such as ‘Is there a bias when the gender of the academic is known?’, ‘Is it the result of the group dynamic of a panel of assessors?’ and ‘Are women encouraged to work in particular research areas, perhaps those outside of STEM subjects?’ will also be addressed.”